A Novel Access and Handover Authentication Scheme in UAV-Aided Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Networks Enabling 5G

As an outlook of the terrestrial network, the flexible Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided satellite-terrestrial integration network would have numerous prospective applications such as service enhancement, maritime communication, military, and emergency communication, which is getting significant attention. However, the public and open-access network must result in various imperative risks including impersonation, sensitive data, and privacy disclosure. Due to several unique characteristics including long transmission distance, unstable communication environment, resource-limited and highly dynamic characteristics of UAVs, diversified terminals that lack the ability of accessing the satellite and may be resource-limited, there are new challenges for the access authentication process in the UAV-Aided Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Networks with 5G. In this paper, we present a novel Physically Unclonable Function (PUF)-based access authentication scheme consisting of two access authentication protocols for the UAV and the ground terminals like 5G User Equipments (UEs), respectively. Two access authentication protocols for the drone and the terminals can both achieve mutual authentication, key agreement, and privacy protection with distinct advantages of no need to store secret key and supporting physical attack resistance. Finally, we propose an efficient handover authentication protocol executed by the ground terminals when the UAV is required to switch. We employ different security analysis tools to analyze the security of all proposed protocols, as well as present informal security analysis on various security properties. The performance comparison and evaluations show our protocols have better advantages.